


Rhapsody

by doomedship



Category: Bodyguard (TV 2018)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-07
Updated: 2018-10-07
Packaged: 2019-07-27 20:06:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,598
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16226402
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doomedship/pseuds/doomedship
Summary: "This is harmony and she thinks if this is the extent of her life, if this is all she ever has, him and her and an old record in the dim light of her midnight apartment, it will be enough."





	Rhapsody

**Author's Note:**

  * For [idektvshows](https://archiveofourown.org/users/idektvshows/gifts).



> This is a oneshot in response to a prompt from the lovely idektvshows, who requested a fic about David and Julia dancing. I actually sat for quite a while thinking about how it would work, since I didn't instinctively think that either of them would be particularly likely to break out into spontaneous dance. As a result, it's a quiet, introspective piece, hopefully atmospheric enough to carry it off. And Roger plays a role. I do love a bit of Roger baiting. 
> 
> Thank you so much for the lovely prompt, and I hope I've done it at least some justice. <3

"You've got to be fucking kidding me."  
  
She never imagined this would go well, but it's a sorry state of affairs by anyone's standards.  
  
She's Home Secretary and her ex-husband is the one in charge of her party line. Everything she says and does is supposed to be run by him. Yet overnight, her quiet affair with her PPO has made headline news in no fewer than six national news outlets.   
  
"Oh, save us both the wounded martyr act, Roger, you can’t pull it off," she snaps, two spots of colour bright on her cheeks. They are facing off against each other over her desk in the Home Office and she's irritated that they've let him in. It's barely even nine but he's been on her like a bloodhound since the early papers were released, his protestations and chastisements a broken record on repeat.   
  
She's annoyed.

Her downfall is a grainy shot, taken from a distance, and in it they're only holding hands as they move the three feet from a ministerial car to her flat. But the outcry that's landed on her doorstep makes it seem like she and David have stripped off in the middle of Hyde Park on a Saturday and gone at it like rabbits in front of an assembled crowd of children and virgins.   
  
"You've made a fucking mockery of yourself, Julia," snarls Roger, crumpling the cover of the Metro with unbridled venom. His narrow eyes dance dangerously. "The PM's not happy."  
  
"He's not happy, or you're not?" Julia snaps back. "Because I've not heard a word out of him all morning, but you've been slavering on my doorstep since four a.m. But I suppose some things never change."  
  
"I'm the bloody chief whip, Julia. _I'm_ the one who deals out discipline. So you can kiss your dreams of taking number ten goodbye. I just hope he was worth it," he says, his polished tones just dripping with satisfied malice.   
  
Julia's eyebrows rise.   
  
"Was?" she says mildly. She feels a stab of satisfaction at the look of dour realisation in Roger’s face.  
  
"You're not seriously thinking of carrying on with him?" Roger's laugh of disbelief doesn't reach his eyes, which remain as hard and unmoved as ever. "PC Plod? What is he, half your age?"  
  
Julia smiles. "No," she says, and she leans in over the desk. "But he might be half yours."   
  
Roger’s face flashes with irritation, but there's nothing he can do. In a few weeks the press will get over the wet dream of a major political figure getting into a sex scandal and life will go on. What will be left afterwards is what she has with David, and in her deceptive world of echoed sound, she thinks it’s worth clinging to something real.   
  
"Mark my words, Julia, this is you finished," growls Roger, but he sounds more and more like the spurned ex he is than a party chief whip. After all, she's done nothing wrong. No one's cheating. He's not her PPO anymore. She has every right to be with him. And if it annoys Roger Penhaligon, well. All the more reason to continue.   
  


....

  
  
"He's got no right," David snaps when she tells him about Roger’s visit later that night. "That bastard."  
  
He's pacing the floor of her flat irritably, footsteps a _thud-thud_ staccato on the polished wood. Julia lays her hand on his arm wearily.   
  
"Don't worry about Roger," she says. "I've been more than capable of handling him for the last twenty years. I'm more concerned about the attention you're about to be subjected to. It won’t be gentle."  
  
He frowns at her. "I'm not worried about that, Julia," he says. "I'm no-one, they'll get tired of talking about me by Friday lunch."   
  
She goes to him and drapes her arms around his neck.   
  
"Well you're certainly not no-one to me," she says quietly. He smiles then, and places his arms around her waist.   
  
The stereo is playing, something bluesy, and the first chord of the saxophone resonates through them in a melancholy vibrato.

That stereo, expensive as it was, sat hardly used until he started coming round, bringing piles of CDs of jazz and country and classical and leaving them on her coffee table. At first the mess annoyed her; now, she has grown used to the constant sound, and finds she can’t quite feel at ease when nothing’s playing. She's come to know the absence of sound as an absence of him, an eventuality which becomes less and less acceptable the further they fall.

The notes cut straight through to her core, waking and stirring and rousing her subconscious, and she sighs against him, her arms twining around his neck and the vibrations of each rise and fall echoing through every sinew of his body straight into hers.   
  
It's his, the music, and as it plays she's suddenly struck by the urge to know about every song he's ever loved.   
  
"Do you play?" she asks, thinking she can see him with his soldier's hands wrapped around the gleam of a polished saxophone, soulful jazz drifting late into the night.  
  
"No," he tells her softly. "Music lessons weren't on the menu in a Glasgow comp in 1992," he says, and she sighs and loops her fingers under the crease of his starched collar. A double whammy, she thinks. A reminder of her age, and the fact that she stands for every privilege he's never had. She wonders if they'll always be this way; like orchestras playing two halves of a wildly different symphony.   
  
He seems to pick up on the melancholy line of her thoughts, and his eyes take on a glimmer of something new, a look caught between mischief and compassion. She looks questioningly at him but he kisses her forehead, and even though she's a sceptic, it feels a lot like absolution.  
  
His left arm slides under her right and lifts it from his neck, holding it tight, while his right loops smoothly around her back and up until it rests just below her shoulder blade, enough pressure to guide, not enough to insist. She looks up at him questioningly, but he just smiles and shakes his head. As the swell of a tremolo rises over the tune, David begins to lead.  
  
The music surrounds her as closely as he does, and it's all she can do to begin to move her feet along with him, movements slow and hesitant as he turns her slowly in her living room. It is slow and spontaneous and elegantly understated, and she trusts him to move her note by note and chord by chord, their movements unravelling before them like staves on a music sheet.

She is passable, enough to keep step, but he moves them like he’s never put a foot wrong, never missed a single beat of this slow-burn rhapsody. And as they revolve, first one way and then the next, she thinks maybe he hasn’t.  
  
The intensity of it makes her breathless. 

 

.....

  
  
The music ends with a delicate duality, saxophone winding subtly with the graceful denouement of the piano keys. 

He turns her slowly, once more, the hand on her shoulder dropping down to rest on the small of her back. The other, he tucks protectively against his chest, where his quick-slow heartbeat carries on the steady rhythm of his dance.    
  
As he looks at her, she realises that she was wrong. She feels for the first time that this is what they've been playing all along: a symphony in full flow, no two halves about it. This is harmony and she thinks if this is the extent of her life, if this is all she ever has, him and her and an old record in the dim light of her midnight apartment, it will be enough.  
  
Standing there, arms around her waist and nose pressed into her jaw, she looks at him with a silent conviction she hopes courses straight through her skin and fills him too.   
  
"That wasn't very Glasgow comp," she says at last, and he laughs quietly.   
  
"My mum was a dance teacher. Wouldn’t let me out of her lessons until I was fourteen."  
  
"The stint in the army is starting to make more sense," she replies, eyes warm.   
  
"Aye," he says, rueful now. She smiles at him, feeling his hesitation, his uncertainty now the music's stopped and in its place he's left with a complex tangle of unknown emotion.

She presses her lips to his, just the barest touch, and then moves her lips to his jaw, his neck, soft breath against his throat sending his eyes flickering towards the ceiling. She tangles one hand into his hair and the other presses to his cheek, and the caution flees from her kiss. She lines them up, chest to chest to hip to hip, and he says something so soft that sounds a lot like love, but the barely-breathed words are too hushed to cross the air.

But she answers anyway, coiling her fingers under his shirt and returning her lips to his, this time holding nothing back from him. The heat between them rises in a soaring crescendo that sets her blood to singing.  
  
"For what it's worth, I think you'll fit quite nicely into my world," she murmurs, when at last they draw apart. He looks at her with the echoes of a smile.    
  
"Well, I'm not going dancing with Roger, love. Not for all the votes in the world."  
  
She laughs long and hard, and the sound’s a vibrant melody in the quiet night.


End file.
